Katherine's Web

By Maureen Mitson

This is the story of a writer unravelling a web of mystery, people and places; the mystery perpetuated through generations and still unresolved. Then a hoard of notes and mementos so unexpected, so astonishing, comes to light from a hiding place cunningly concealed that our writer senses they were not meant to be discovered. Should she betray a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Jul 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781760415822

Maureen Mitson

Maureen Mitson was born in England and moved with her family to Adelaide in 1954. She celebrated her fiftieth birthday by gaining a degree in Communication Studies and Literary Studies and her creative writing career began. Maureen has won prizes for her short stories and poems. They have been read over the air on Radio Adelaide and by the Queensland Story Teller, and have also been featured in anthologies.

Book preview

Chapter One

Sally

4 November 2017

I sit on my rocker with the cuppa and pull Mog onto my lap. He’s always good company when I want to grumble. No prize breed, just a cat once too beautiful as a kitten to be left on the streets. I turn on my recorder – usual habit when I’m musing on a theme or trying out an angle. First, the date: Saturday 4 November 2017.

Trouble is, Mum’s long had this envy – if that’s the word – of my dad’s lineage. There’s no aristocracy, old-settler-worthy or whomsoever – not as far as I know. Granny Kath was simply proud of her roots, as they say. We heard little of family faults from her, of any lessening of standards, principles and ideals – but that was just her way. No spicy or gossipy stuff of the sort my mum longed to hear ever broke over her lips. Circumspect, was Mum’s more polite description. I’m convinced she’s dying to have Gran unmasked and the secrets of her missing years investigated.

What years were they? Before Gran moved to live on my parent’s property in her little granny flat, she was a single mum and raised her Samuel, my dad, in a rented house in the western suburbs. I never heard my mum criticise her for raising Sam on her own. Why would she? He finished school, went to some accountancy or bookkeeping college and, it has to be said, he was a great dad to me. No degrees in management or anything, yet he built up a prosperous business. Mum helped run the office.

I do know Gran put money into the little granny flat they built for her after they married. I’m now in my fifties and dear old Gran lived there since before I was born, until she died when she was almost ninety-nine. ‘A good innings,’ proclaimed my cricket-loving dad. I still miss her.

‘So, Mog, what secrets are waiting to be found? And what’s mysterious about being a librarian? Especially one who always wore lavender-coloured cardies on cold days. She sometimes wagged her finger at my teenage stories but she was Granny Kath, trusted and friendly. I have to admit, as I grew older, had my boys and they grew up with their great-gran still in their life when some of their mates didn’t even have grandparents, that was great. Real lap of the gods stuff. I still miss her and seeing her empty flat being now only another of my mum’s projects hurts a little.

‘She didn’t like cats much. She inherited a stray but it was a scratchy beast and I don’t think I ever saw her cuddle it, but she bought it chicken necks to gnaw on! Used to say to me that even cats deserve a cup of kindness now and again. Funny way of talking. We know she left to go to England in 1931: went for a year and stayed almost fifteen, as I understand it. Those are the only missing years but that’s where she was a teacher. Had standards, principles – hated women wearing trousers but gave up barking at me when I explained about maintaining modesty among a class of primary kids. I know she upgraded her qualifications to include librarianship while her Samuel was little. And that’s Gran – respectably uneventful, even dull. She was under Mum’s eyes all the time they lived back here and yet she’s still supposed to have secrets!’

Mog’s response was to sneeze. I put him in the laundry out of the way and go back to the suitcase.

I riffle through some of the papers… Hmm. Definitely Granny Kath’s handwriting; neat and tidy cursive. Ahah – some dates atop a page or two. Can determine a sequence… Well, that is something: 1929! Nearly ninety years ago. October and something else unintelligible. Hmm…quite a selection of notebook pages, single coloured notes. Worth a proper look.

I sat there, looking at the pile, feeling like an interloper. I can smell the deceptively gentle lavender soap, Granny’s favourite, and it’s been holding these papers together for – how long? Like she was maintaining a grip. Silly thought – these papers weren’t hidden; she would have known Dad would look through them. And hers was a real sober-sides position; can’t imagine her involved in any espionage, or even anything slightly shady! Gave up the volunteering when computers interfered and it wasn’t her library any more. She was ancient by then, anyway. I used to visit her in her little house, we’d swap stories, I added my school newsy bits to hers. Then when I entered teacher training college in Wattle Park, she was so pleased she even shed a tear or two. As for when I actually started teaching, she announced herself chuffed to doll rags – one of her weird sayings.

I know she had once wanted to teach – ‘then life got in the way’. She did do some sort of teaching, specialist stuff, but although she dropped hints and I waited for her to enlarge on them, nothing followed. She once visited a local primary school and spoke about Germany and took along some wonderful old carved wooden toys to show. I’d seen them but she kept them in a cupboard. In a drawer, she kept a folded German flag – one of the fancy ones with a crown on it. I found it while poking around one day and she was furious with me. Never saw it again. Gran didn’t moan about fate or anything like that, was never overly critical of anyone or anything; she was just Granny and a friend to everyone. I could trust her with stuff I wouldn’t tell my mum. She had a mischievous sense of humour – and her chuckle was so infectious.

That chuckle. Thinking of it brings back a memory; a special day. It was 10 August of the year before she died – that makes it 2010. Only a casual visit from me but turned out to be a lucky date; Gran brought out her Johnson’s teapot with the big blue flowers on; no tea bags for us that day. She’d made some gingery biscuits, delicious. We sat on the old wicker chairs with the knobbly cushions in her sunroom and when I raised my eyebrows as Gran poured the tea into matching dainty cups with saucers, instead of our usual mugs, the little ceremony was explained.

‘Your Grandad David would have been one hundred years old today if he’d lived, Sally. All these years we could have shared. He never, ever knew my Australia, though I talked about it, often, and he so wanted to come over.’

I was momentarily lost for words but she held out the plate of biscuits. ‘Have another one, dear girl. This is my mother’s old recipe. My Oma Kate, Katherine Flach, showed us how to make them once, she called them pfefferkuchen. I used to bake them for your grandad and he’d take a batch whenever he went on a sortie.’

I was intrigued. ‘A sortie, Granny?’

‘You know he was in the Royal Air Force? That’s the British one. He was a wireless operator in the war – the Second World War that was. Sortie was the word the pilots used. David learned on planes called Dominics – no, Dominies – specially used for training wireless operators. He wanted to fly on the Wellington bomber but instead he was made aircrew on a Whitley bomber, an Armstrong Whitworth Whitley. There were some Australian flyers on those aircraft too; they enlisted to go over to England. All brave lads.’

She almost grinned. ‘You see, not all old ladies like me lose their memories! And for much of 1940 he seemed to be dropping leaflets over Germany, not bombs. They called it the Phoney War – I was so relieved, it all sounded less dangerous than I’d imagined. David was actually trained as a wireless operator and air gunner. But it was a very short period of training.’

She crunched one of her pfefferkuchen noisily, and only resumed talking after she swallowed the whole biscuit. I was fascinated. I’d heard little of this.

‘David was based in the Midlands – somewhere around Birmingham, if I remember rightly. But we could meet when he came through to Kendal with others of his unit for parts or something. During his months at Driffield, I saw him only three times; very short visits made while their convoy passed through Kendal making for a base down south. That last time just after Christmas – Christmas ’41, that was – he’d tried to get home for that and it was my birthday as well – they were to be sent out laying mines over the sea, after dark. It was the biggest hazard, he said. They had to fly so close to the water, apparently. That time he talked of living on borrowed time.

‘His job was to send and receive wireless signals while they were flying and pass them to the pilot. But they usually flew at night and so he also helped his friend Peter, called an observer, I think, to spot enemy aircraft and somehow calculate navigational fixes. If they were attacked, though, he was expected to use their machine gun to fight off the enemy. Their weaponry was retaliatory only, defensive. That worried me dreadfully… Then they made him a sergeant, which thrilled him. He was so proud of what he was doing you see. They gave him a badge with a wing on it called a brevet to put on his tunic and I laughed because it had the letters WAG written on it. He was annoyed with me thinking it funny, but wag is a word my Australian papa used to describe someone who messed about a bit, you know, played the comic. What David was doing was not at all funny.

‘You know, Sally, being the Jeremiah I am, I’d prepared myself for the worst possible news. Even before the war actually started, I feared the worst. Then our little boy had his first birthday and I took him for a studio photo to send to David. I still wish I knew that he received it – he’d changed bases. He was doing further wireless training somewhere, in fact helping with the training, and then moved elsewhere. I snapped later ones with my Box Brownie and he received some of them, I know that, but I didn’t receive letters telling me he’d received all of them.

‘Hmm. I remember how a bit later – was it 1941? Yes…it was all over the wireless that Rommel’s Afrika Corps had attacked our forces in Tobruk. I was in a real tizz with worry about the baby coming and David being away so much but he came back for two days when he received the telegram about Samuel Francis hurrying into this world. I remember, he patted Sammy’s head and said, Fancy you arriving on the Ides of March, my son. I hope it’s not an omen.’

My dad, wow. This was new to me. First time I’d heard her talk, really talk, of my dad when he was little.

She sat back in her squeaky chair. ‘David was away a lot and I couldn’t visit. Driffield was the home of Four Group, and I wasn’t allowed there. He found it hard to find transport down to Kendal, too. I was…I was incredibly sad, that he couldn’t know Sam, that Sam would grow older seeing so little of his father. Sam turned one then two and three and never really saw his dad for longer than a few days. We communicated mainly with letters, long ones, but he rarely answered my questions or responded to my comments. David was all about his work, you see. I so hoped he received that studio photo taken of me and Sammy when the boy was only a year old but he never said. I kept meaning to have another taken but I didn’t. I had taken those photos with my Box Brownie, though, to send to his base.

‘D’you know, Sally, although I missed David, I couldn’t feel as upset for myself, as I knew was expected of me. I had prepared myself, you see. I felt a fraud, actually. In Sam, I saw David and knew he would always be with me in that way and, in a strange prophetic way, I sensed that was all I would have.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘Not that I was reading the tea leaves! His task was not without danger, despite the newspapers laughing at the leaflet dropping. That was months earlier of course. No one took it seriously early on, I think they all thought Germany would capitulate or something. Mr Churchill of course cautioned that a wave of perverse optimism would only add to our peril. Then after Sam arrived, our life together became only a series of precious interludes in between weeks of loneliness. I was glad to have Sam for company at those times. And my mum, I so missed her. Even after…well, that’s all passed. She did write now and again after I had baby Sam. More after my father died. He hadn’t wanted me back but Mum…well, she was always asking me then why I wasn’t shipping home. As if the seas were clear of danger! I knew only too well at that time how hazardous they were.

‘Don’t mistake me, Sally. I loved your grandfather in my own way but I was learning to accept what seemed to me the most probable outcome, that though he would always be a part of my life, he would not be significant in it. I was becoming a fatalist. It was a profound realisation and driven by the wartime situation. We’d been together not long at all before he joined up. Afterwards we saw even less of each other.’

Long talk. She refuelled, dipping another biscuit in her cup of tea and sucking it with gusto.

‘He was such a good-looking man, my David. We met first in 1934, or was it ’33? We announced our engagement quite promptly so he could – with a measure of propriety – take me to the Isle of Man to watch the famous TT motorcycle race. David loved the speed of racing! To my mind, he drove too fast on his own bike but he liked the fresh air round his ears, so he said. I think that was probably the first time in years that I’d written home and that was only because David insisted. Mum sent me a prompt reply asking me to be sure of my mind, asking who was this David? Each letter cost her a one shilling-and-sixpenny stamp then and the expense concerned me at times. I was so pleased when the aerogramme forms came into being later on – must have been towards the end of the war. Suppose I then felt less guilty. I should have been better, more prompt in replying, I suppose, knowing how things came about later on. I didn’t answer every time, you see. There was a period when…well, that doesn’t matter. It was an expense for me too and I was watching my pennies closely, as you would understand.

‘When we married, we went on the train to Morecambe and he said the train was too slow! We hadn’t been in a hurry to marry but I found out I was expecting and no way, no way, would I have anoth…an illegitimate child. Strange day, Sally. We married in a registry office there with my uncle and aunt as witnesses – rather hurried, really, but at least the deed was done and it was honourable. Then after all the rush, I had a miscarriage.’

‘Oh, Granny!’

‘Ancient history now, dear. David decided not to buy a motorbike, not even one with a sidecar. He said we’d save up for a car. I was not terribly interested in bikes and motors other than if they were a comfortable means of transport. David loved the bikes and knew all the professional riders’ names of course. They were unimportant to me. He, your grandfather, loved speed, like I said. It seemed to fit with his later wish to fly planes. It was the planes that killed him in March 1942.’

Her voice broke, she coughed, sniffed and rubbed her eyes, then continued, ‘David’s plane was shot down while laying mines in the sea on what they called the U-boat lanes.’

I remember every detail of that afternoon in her conservatory, so rarely did she open up of her past life. At that point, she took a long sip of tea and gazed out at the garden, daydreaming…far away. I sat quietly sipping, and waiting. She spoke as if it was all only yesterday – not more than fifty years ago – talking of my dad as a baby, and how his dad, my grandfather, liked motorbikes. What’s more, Gran knows a bit about bikes. Somehow can’t see her sitting on one…doesn’t fit the image. That’s one thing I do know; the scar down the outside of her leg was from turning a corner on the motorbike. We’d been one day speaking of my son Alexander, how he wanted a motorbike to ride to uni, and she had been horrified! She told us David was taking a corner too fast and they were almost flat to the road, she said. Her knee was badly scraped and cut.

And that bit about her mother writing only after her father died… I was nonplussed, trying to work out what questions to ask, but I noticed she had that faraway look as she sipped the last of her tea

‘You know, Sally, when they came to tell me about David, I was more worried about little Samuel. He had a fever. but he was well enough to yell and yell the whole time the policeman was at the door.’

‘Policeman? Not an airman?’

She gave me a sad smile and handed me her empty cup and saucer. ‘I’d moved back to Beast Banks, you see, and Kendal was handy enough to see David. I hadn’t thought Samuel would be the last of the line, Sally. Shock, that was.’

Last of the line? Hey! What about Sam’s grandsons? My sons? Surely… I turned round and she was already dozing in her chair. Dear Gran, she had talked a lot and I’d learned more about her life and feelings that day than ever before. She wasn’t all routine and library books after all. Long letters, hmm. I made a quiet exit over to my parents’ place.

Although years have gone by, yet that conversation with Gran was so rare and so fascinating I still remember it almost word for word.

Chapter Two

Sally

So sitting here years later thinking of that phrase, memories being a construction, I wonder if I had heard Gran accurately. Did she almost say ‘another illegitimate child’ that day? To my knowledge, my dad Samuel was her one and only, but she mentioned a miscarriage. When? Perhaps… I wonder could some of this suitcase stuff yield an answer or two?

I move to pick up that little snapshot of the doll. Mum knew of no Avril.